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| {{isdacomp|5(a)(ii)}}
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| Across the street from SOCA the orange tip of a cigarette burned, and the eyes behind it watched the lights on the Legal and Compliance floor cut out abruptly at 8pm, as they always did. The young girl's face glowed in the white glare of the screen in front of her.
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| Susan leaned back and stretched, as she always did, and waved her arms. When nothing happened she stood up and kicked starjumps until the motion sensor recognised her living form and put the lights back on. The argon strips blinked and Susan slumped back down with a sigh.
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| Across the street, the watching eyes smiled, as they always did, at this daily routine. Next show, 9pm.
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| The daily batches of trading activity start to come in from the investment banks at about five. Always first: Wickliffe Stroud Securities. They're meant to be automated, and if they were they would be transmitted in a flat file down a secure link within miliseconds of their scheduled batch process, but in practice they will be delayed by up to three hours as hapless souls in the operations infrastructures of each bank battle their internal leviathans to match, amalgamate and error check data feeding from creaking, incompatible and unfit legacy systems and format it manually for the upload.
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| It isn't meant to be like that, but everyone knows it.
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| All, except wickliffe stroud securities. Every day, without fail at 18:55. Perfect, seamless, pure data, all timestamped within 15 seconds of the upload time.
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| That is one mf of a backoffice systems those guys have. So always Wickliffe Stroud was first; always was it clean, and always did it reconcile perfectly with the corresponding portfolios from its counterparties.
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| No-one else had data as clean and clear as that: to the point where at one stage SOCA informally reconciled all the other banks systems and its own data by reference to WSSL reference data set.
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| It was susan herself who had pointed out the problem with that approach: we're supposed to be monitoring them: we are fundamentally in default of that obligation if we treat all their data as gospel. So the rec was switched off and Susan began developing some organic but adhoc alternatives. They didn'''t work as well, but they had the advantage of being independent and they stared to throw some interesting new light and throw up interesting possibilities for new ways soca could interrogate the portfolio. That had led to a couple of insider trading convictions against small equity hedge fund managers and had picked up some phantom bookings from a prospective rogue trader in france. This had led to susan's machine being branded "precrime".
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| But never, never, did they identify any problems with Wickliffe Stroud's bookings. They were immaculate.
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